Position Feedback Research Articles

Integrated optimization design and motion control of multi-configuration unmanned metamorphic vehicle

An unmanned metamorphic vehicle is a new deformable robot that can transform its configuration according to different road conditions in order to realize wheeled driving or legged walking. This paper proposes a method of multi-objective integrated optimization design based on the motion control of unmanned metamorphic vehicle. The aim of this method is to improve the stability and reduce energy consumption of multi-configuration motion. The vehicle state configuration and the humanoid state walking performance were designed. The kinematic model of reconfiguration and humanoid walking was established from screw theory, while the Lagrangian dynamics model for reconfiguration and humanoid walking using analytical mechanics. Reconfiguration and gait planning were carried out for an unmanned metamorphic vehicle, and a sliding mode controller was designed for position feedback control of the zero moment point in order to improve the stability of reconfiguration and walking. In order to improve the kinematic performance of an unmanned metamorphic vehicle under multiconfiguration, the NSGA-II intelligent optimization algorithm was used to optimize the multi-objective integrated design of the structural parameters, posture parameters, and control parameters of the sliding mode controller of the system. The simulation and test results showed that the integrated design performs higher reconfiguration stability, lower energy consumption, and higher control quality than the sequential design and pre-optimization under the reconfiguration condition; in the vehicle state, the transient steering stability and the steady-state steering stability of the system during driving are significantly improved; in the humanoid state, the energy consumption of the striding process and the movement of the center of mass to the single-legged support region in the walking process is reduced and the walking stability is improved, thus is more conducive to walking.

Optimization of vibration control using a hybrid scheme with sliding‐mode and positive position feedback

AbstractThis article presents the design of a nonlinear hybrid controller for an underactuated Duffing oscillator with 2 degrees of freedom. The main control purpose is to reduce the frequency‐response to specific resonant‐frequencies while maintaining its robustness to external disturbances. The resulting hybrid controller uses sliding mode control (SMC) with a positive position feedback (PPF) scheme. This is structured such that the SMC provides system robustness and tracking, while the PPF allows damping specific resonant frequencies. The system was evaluated using frequency sweeps in terms of acceleration in the second degree of freedom. In this case, the control input is applied through the first degree of freedom. Moreover, multi‐objective optimization is implemented to tune of the control parameters. Simulation results show that the system response to external vibrations can be reduced up to 83.88% by using the proposed PPF + SMC scheme.

Feedback hybrid force and position control of an upper limb exoskeleton to support human movement

In the paper, a feedback hybrid control including a force feedback control and a position control is proposed to control a four degree of freedom (4-dof) upper limb exoskeleton for supporting human movement at the shoulder, elbow and wrist joints. The novelty of the paper is that it has been able to control all the interaction forces at all links in the exoskeleton robot by using the proposed control. The desired interaction forces at the links and desired position are compared with the measured interaction forces and position, respectively. Then the torque at the shoulder, the torque elbow and the torque wrist joints are controlled to compensate the force error and the position error. The gains of the proposed controller are optimized by using the Balancing Composite Motion Optimization (BCMO). The simulation and control of the 4-dof upper limb exoskeleton using the proposed control is carried out in the paper to show that the interaction forces and the position of the exoskeleton track their desired values.

Mathematical model of the control system of mobile caterpillar robot taking into account kinematic and dynamic parameters

The paper developed a mathematical model of the control system for a mobile tracked robot, which takes into account the kinematic parameters (angular speeds of rotation of the rollers and the center of mass of the robot, the linear speed of the robot and its angle of rotation relative to the normal to the axis) and dynamic parameters (moments of inertia, resistance forces and electromechanical parameters used electric motors), which made it possible to give the most complete mathematical representation of the description of the movement of a caterpillar mobile robot. A control system for mobile robots along a predetermined trajectory is obtained, taking into account position feedback.

Reduced corticospinal drive and inflexible temporal adaptation during visually guided walking in older adults.

Corticospinal drive during walking is reduced in older adults compared with young adults, but it is not clear how this decrease might compromise one's ability to adjust stepping, particularly during visuomotor adaptation. We hypothesize that age-related changes in corticospinal drive could predict differences in older adults' step length and step time adjustments in response to visual perturbations compared with younger adults. Healthy young (n = 21; age 18-33 yr) and older adults (n = 20; age 68-80 yr) were tested with a treadmill task, incorporating visual feedback of the foot position and stepping targets in real-time. During adaptation, the visuomotor gain was reduced on one side, causing the foot cursor and step targets to move slower on that side of the screen (i.e., split-visuomotor adaptation). Corticospinal drive was quantified by coherence between electromyographic signals in the beta-gamma frequency band (15-45 Hz). The results showed that 1) older adults adapted to visuomotor perturbations during walking, with a similar reduction in error asymmetry compared with younger adults; 2) however, older adults showed reduced adaptation in step time symmetry, despite demonstrating similar adaptation in step length asymmetry compared with younger adults; and 3) smaller overall changes in step time asymmetry was associated with reduced corticospinal drive to the tibialis anterior in the slow leg during split-visuomotor adaptation. These findings suggest that changes in corticospinal drive may affect older adults' control of step timing in response to visual challenges. This could be important for safe navigation when walking in different environments or dealing with unexpected circumstances.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Corticospinal input is essential for visually guided walking, especially when the walking pattern must be modified to accurately step on safe locations. Age-related changes in corticospinal drive are associated with inflexible step time, which necessitates different locomotor adaptation strategies in older adults.

On controlling, Vibration Performance and Energy Transfer of an Offshore Wind Turbine Tower System via PPF Controller

In this paper, we focus on the control, energy transfer, and vibration performance under multi mixed excitations for the offshore wind turbine tower (OWTT) system. For reducing the controlled system oscillations, the positive position feedback (PPF) controller is applied. The energy transfers occur in the system of wind turbine by adding the PPF controller to the system equations. With the help of the phase plane approach, frequency response equations, and Poincare maps, the bifurcation and stability at worst resonance cases are sought and investigated. The vibration behaviors are studied numerically at different parameters values for the wind turbine system. Additionally, the response and numerical outcomes are examined, also, the approach of multiple scales is used to establish the approximate solutions of the wind turbine-controlled system. Besides that, MAPLE and MATLAB algorithms are used to implement the numerical results and compare analytical solutions with numerical behavior. The results also be compared to previous research that has been published.

On slow-flow dynamics, stability charts, and vibration elimination of a self-excited structure utilizing a novel control technique

This work focuses on vibration elimination, bifurcation control, and stability achievement in a harmonically forced self-excited nonlinear oscillator. A novel control technique called the Integral Resonant Positive Position Feedback Controller () has been introduced in this study. The proposed controller is composed of second-order and first-order filters, integrated into the targeted oscillator in nonlinear form. Then, the averaging equations governing the slow-flow dynamics of the coupled systems are deduced. Subsequently, the relevant nonlinear algebraic system, which characterizes the static bifurcation, is obtained. The effectiveness of the controller in eliminating system vibrations, controlling nonlinear bifurcations, and stabilizing the unstable motion is investigated through bifurcation diagrams, two-dimensional stability charts, and numerical simulations of the instantaneous vibrations. The conducted analyses approved that the not only can stabilize the unstable motion of the considered system, but also it can completely eliminate the self-excited vibration regardless of the forcing magnitude and excitation frequencies. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is conducted to evaluate the control performance of the in comparison to previously utilized control techniques for vibration control in self-excited systems. The comparative results demonstrate that the exhibits superior performance in terms of vibration elimination efficiency, bifurcation control, and stability achievement. Finally, numerical validation corroborated our analytical findings, showing alignment with the analytical solution. Moreover, the simulation results demonstrated that the effectively mitigates undesired vibrations, reducing them to zero in a short transient period.

Analysis of an actively controlled composite box manipulator without external actuator

This study focuses on active vibration control for a single-link composite box manipulator by using a single actuator for driving and control actions. Model extraction and system identification techniques are studied to obtain mathematical models of the manipulator. The state space model is extracted from the finite element model using modal analysis conducted in ANSYS, while the system identification approach is an experimental modeling method using the input and output signals of the system. The input signals are defined as triangular and trapezoidal motion profiles, while the output signals are the acceleration signals of the manipulator. Proportional derivative and positive position feedback controllers are implemented on the obtained mathematical models to reduce residual vibrations. The simulation results are successfully verified by experiments, and uncontrolled/controlled results are evaluated with reduction rates.

Neural-Network-Based Adaptive Finite-Time Output Feedback Control for Spacecraft Attitude Tracking.

This brief is concerned with neural network (NN)-based adaptive finite-time output feedback attitude tracking control for rigid spacecraft in the presence of actuator saturation, inertial uncertainty, and external disturbance. First, a neural state observer is designed to estimate the unknown state. Then, based on the estimated state, the adaptive neural finite-time command filtered backstepping (CFB) is applied to construct virtual control signal and controller with updating law. The finite-time command filter is given to avoid the computation complexity problem in traditional backstepping, and the compensation signals based on fractional power are constructed to remove filtering errors. Using Lyapunov stability theory, we show that the attitude tracking error (TE) can converge into the desired neighborhood of the origin in finite time and all the signals in the closed-loop system are bounded in finite time although input saturation exists. The numerical simulations are used to show the effectiveness of the given algorithm.

An Optimized PLL With Time Delay and Harmonic Suppression for Improved Position Estimation Accuracy of PMSM Based on Levenberg–Marquardt

This paper proposes an optimized phase-locked loop (OPLL) based on Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) to improve the estimation accuracy of the sliding mode observer (SMO) based position estimator. The position estimation suffers from dc bias caused by digital control delay, and harmonic caused by inverter nonlinearity and flux spatial harmonics. The OPLL is constructed with two parts to overcome the above negative effects. The delay phase is preliminarily calculated based on linear prediction, so as to compensate for the lag phase in the estimated back electromotive force (back-EMF); secondly, the objective function is built based on the reference and feedback position error, the former contains an unknown harmonic. The objective function can be minimized by the LM to solve for the harmonic amplitude, then the obtained harmonic is used to offset the harmonic components in the estimated position. Wherein, the required partial derivatives of the LM method can be deduced based on the transfer function of PLL and the delay-compensated back-EMF to achieve a stable update of harmonic amplitude. Finally, the corresponding comparative experiments in steady-state and dynamic conditions proved the superiority of the proposed method applied to permanent magnet synchronous motors.

Periodic Perturbations of Codimension-Two Bifurcations with a Double Zero Eigenvalue in Symmetrical Dynamical Systems

We study bifurcation behavior in periodic perturbations of two-dimensional symmetric systems exhibiting codimension-two bifurcations with a double zero eigenvalue when the frequencies of the perturbation terms are small. We transform the periodically perturbed systems to simpler ones which are periodic perturbations of the normal forms for the codimension-two bifurcations, and apply the subharmonic and homoclinic Melnikov methods to analyze bifurcations occurring there. In particular, we show that there exist transverse homoclinic or heteroclinic orbits, which yield chaotic dynamics, in wide parameter regions. These results can be applied to three or higher-dimensional systems and even to infinite-dimensional systems with the assistance of center manifold reduction and the invariant manifold theory. We illustrate our theory for a pendulum subjected to position and velocity feedback control when the desired position is periodic in time. We also give numerical computations by the computer tool AUTO to demonstrate the theoretical results.

Feedback As a New Regulation in Metacognitive Reading Strategies: Review on Metacognitive Regulation

Reading is an activity that requires time and persistence, so it needs certain strategies to avoid boredom. Even though it is not a new thing in reading activity, some articles show that Metacognitive Reading Strategies are still relevant nowadays as one of the strategies used to gain students' comprehension in reading. In MRS, feedback has a significant influence on students' comprehension. However, feedback is a dependent factor because it can exist in every step of MRS (in planning, monitoring, and evaluating regulations). This is initial research on the position of feedback as a new regulation in MRS after evaluating step. The data were taken from a literature review which reveals metacognitive regulation and how feedback affects the student's reading comprehension.

Research on workspace visual-based continuous switching sliding mode control for cable-driven parallel robots

AbstractAchieving the high-precision control of cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) is complex because of their structural properties. In this paper, a quintessential redundant CDPR is designed as the research subject, and a continuous switching sliding mode controller based on workspace vision is implemented to enhance the accuracy and stability of trajectory tracking. In addition, a virtual prototype of the CDPR with uncertainties is created in the simulation analysis software ADAMS, and co-simulation is performed with the control system designed in Simulink to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. Furthermore, a CDPR platform is established for trajectory tracking experiments using the visual-based position feedback method. The trajectory tracking performance with the three control schemes is then evaluated. The experimental results show that the continuous switching sliding mode control algorithm can significantly decrease trajectory tracking errors and exhibit superior trajectory tracking performance compared to the other control strategies.

Linear Quadratic Gaussian Control for a Liquid-Carrying Quadrotor

A quadrotor with a liquid tank may be used in various tasks such as spraying pesticides and firefighting. Therefore, motion of the quadrotor should be controlled such that liquid sloshing is suppressed. To tackle this issue, a LQG controller is proposed in this paper. The LQG controller is based on a linear equivalent mechanical model for liquid sloshing which is presented in this study. The proposed controller uses position and attitude feedback of quadrotor to estimate and control the liquid states. This is different than other controllers presented in the literature where they consider liquid sloshing as an external disturbance. LQG controller is simulated using system’s nonlinear equations and compared to a PID controller. The results depicted a 20% improvement in trajectory tracking performance for LQG controller while using 11% less energy than its PID counterpart. Also the LQG control scheme was able to compensate for a constant external disturbance whereas the PID controller was not able to stabilize the system while the constant disturbance is present.

Adaptive output feedback attitude control for reusable launch vehicle with input constraints and actuator faults

This paper considers an adaptive output feedback fault tolerant control (FTC) for a reusable launch vehicle (RLV) during reentry phase for which four grid fins are used as actuators. Based on a prescribed tracking performance and an auxiliary system to deal with the input constraints, the proposed adaptive controller can compensate for the effect of uncertainties, external and internal disturbances, input constraints and actuator faults. It is shown that with the proposed scheme, the system tracking performance can be guaranteed even in the presence multiple actuator faults. The influence of the input constraints on the tracking performance is also investigated. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

(Invited) The Electrostatic Levitation Furnace Onboard the International Space Station for Container-Less Material Processing and Thermophysical Property Measurements at Extremely High Temperature

Electrostatic levitation is one of the container-less processing methods which utilizes Coulomb force between a charged sample and surrounding electrodes. Contrary to the other methods, electrostatic levitation cannot create a potential minimum, so high-speed feedback position control is necessary. Because of this technical difficulty, development of this method was behind to other methods, such as electromagnetic levitation, or acoustic levitation. Samples can be levitated even in ground. However, to levitate samples against gravity, huge electric field and huge surface charge on the sample are required. This creates some limitations in ground experiments. Firstly, Oxides samples are hard to levitate due to low surface charge. Secondly, experiment in inert gas environment is impossible to prevent electric discharge among electrodes. These limitations can be easily solved in microgravity. Oxides sample cane be levitated and melted. Metals and alloys can be processed in inert gas to suppress evaporation.The electrostatic levitation furnace on the International Space Station (ISS-ELF) developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, was launched to the ISS in 2015. Then, Installation to the MSPR (multi-purpose Small Payload Rack) was conducted in the next year. Since then, a variety of oxide/ metal samples have been levitated and melted in the facility. The ISS-ELF has a capability to measure thermophysical property of extremely high temperature melts. Density, Surface tension, and viscosity can be measured by this facility. Status of thermophysical property measurements is described in this presentation.

Kinematic modeling and motion control of a parallel robotic antenna pedestal

AbstractThis paper deals with kinematic modeling and motion control of a novel antenna pedestal based on parallel robotic mechanism. Its active joints are two sliders equipped with DC motors on a circular rail. The synchronous and asynchronous motions of the two sliders enable the antenna to rotate in azimuth and pitch. In order to solve the problem of trajectory deviation caused by nonlinear friction and other uncertain disturbances, the structure of the antenna is described at the beginning, and then, the kinematic model is established based on geometry method. Then, the fuzzy PI (FPI) control system is designed based on the position feedback of the driving slider to realize the trajectory tracking of the desired curve. Finally, the parameters of the FPI controller are optimized and validated by Simulink simulation experiments. The tracking performance and the effectiveness of the control algorithm on prototype are verified by experiments of typical trajectory following control.

Time-Varying Formation Tracking for Second Order Multi-Agent Systems: An Experimental Approach for Wheeled Robots

In this paper, a time-varying formation tracking protocol for second-order multi-sgent systems (MASs) is presented. The time-varying formation considers translation, rotation, and scaling of the geometric pattern that defines the formation. The control law is simple yet effective, and it is composed of a trajectory tracking control and a consensus control that considers the position and velocity feedback of the connected agents in the MAS. The closed-loop system is asymptotically stable, and this was proved using the Gershgoring’s disk theorem. The performance of the protocol was extensively tested in experiments using a dynamic extension of the differential-drive robot model. The protocol was tested for different communication topologies and also dealt with switching topologies. The proposed protocol presented good performance regaring both time-varying formation and topology changes. Moreover, a comparison with an existing controller and with only trajectory tracking control has been provided, thus showing that the proposed protocol preserves the formation for all the tested topologies in a better way.

Output feedback attitude control of flexible spacecraft under actuator misalignment and input nonlinearities

The attitude tracking control problem of flexible spacecraft subjected to parameter uncertainties, time-dependent external disturbances, actuator input nonlinearity, and input actuator misalignment is investigated in this paper. Explicitly, the proposed strategy addresses the input actuator misalignment and dead-zone issues that increase the controller design difficulties. Initially, a new second-order sliding mode observer (SoSMO) using an extended state approach is developed by adding a correction function to improve observer performance to estimate unwanted system perturbations. Then, a distinct SoSMO-based integral-type sliding mode control (ISMC) structure is designed in a unified manner to guarantee the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system. Comparative numerical simulations under input actuator misalignment, the dead-zone nonlinearity, external disturbance, and inertia uncertainty are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

5-axes Levitation of a Rotor by Active Magnetic Bearings Employing Direct Output Feedback Control

In recent years the application of active magnetic bearings (AMB), as supporting element as well as vibration controller for rotors, has attracted considerable attention from researchers. In this work an attempt has been made for the complete levitation of a rotor weighing 4 kg, supported on two radial active magnetic bearings and two axial passive magnetic bearings (PMB) resulting in 5-axes levitation. The active bearings working in the mode of attraction make the system inherently unstable. Herein, a direct output feedback control scheme based on proportional and derivative of position signal has been employed to achieve stability. The active magnetic bearings consist of electromagnetic actuators, proximity probes for position measurement, feedback controller and current feedback type power amplifier. The passive bearings consisting of axially magnetized circular permanent magnets work in the mode of repulsion. The design of the electromagnetic actuator has been carried out considering load carrying capacity of the AMB, core loss and the resistive loss in the coil, so that the temperature rise in the core as well as in the coil is within allowable limit. Design of the feedback controller is based on direct output feedback control scheme, which makes the controller design easier and implementation of the controller hardware becomes simpler. The feedback controller parameters have been selected appropriately to generate required stiffness and damping in the AMBs for stable levitation of the rotor. The rotor has been driven up to a speed of 2000 rpm.